


come out to the sea, my love (and drown with me)

by roseisreturning



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-11-26
Packaged: 2018-02-20 20:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2441180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseisreturning/pseuds/roseisreturning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a mermaid and a marine biologist are more similar than different, hands are sometimes made of metal, and privacy is subjective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PoeticallyIrritating](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/gifts).



> warning throughout the work for uncomfy relationship dynamics. not too much you wouldn't get in the show itself, but very different from my usual aus, so keep that in mind!

This is the fourth time the woman with the camera has joined you underwater and the fourth she has failed to see you. Though she wears the same clothes—different, but not entirely, from the other humans who come here—her camera is missing today. This is the first time for that, and she looks a kind of empty without it. You do not think she is quite like other humans. Sheis human, almost definitely, because she has the same pale, long limbs that humans do, but there is something in the way she uses them that makes you feel that she is as different by nature from them as even you are.

She sees you then, as you are thinking there is something to her that feels the same and different and wonderful, swimming over to you with just enough grace that you don’t think to move.

She looks at you for a moment, almost confused, then starts swimming to the surface, stopping briefly to nod for you to join her.

You do.

When you break the surface just after, she is smiling at you, looking just slightly embarrassed.

“What?” You haven’t said anything today, because the words are all the same, and your voice reflects this.

“Are you not wearing anything?” she asks. She has—you have only heard the word twice—an accent, you think, and it suits her.

You shrug. “Uh, no.”

“But you’re okay, yes?”

“Yeah,” you say. “For sure.”

“And you don’t need my help in finding your…?”

“I, uh, didn’t lose anything. Did you lose your camera?” You had repeated the word forever after you first heard it, but it still feels wrong.

She doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, she asks, “Do I know you from somewhere?” which is something you hadn’t planned on addressing. “I’m sorry, I’ve only been here—three months, I believe. It’s been… overwhelming. Could you… reintroduce yourself?”

You smile, like this is a common exchange. “Sure,” you say, “yeah, uh, I’m Cosima.”

“Cosima,” she repeats, probably trying to remember how she knows you. “Delphine.”

You don’t remember ever hearing what happens after this, so you stay quiet.

Delphine—her name suits her, too, you think—looks first awkward, then concerned. “You can’t be okay,” she says.

You laugh nervously, which you have seen humans do and hope they trust. “I am,” you say.

“At least come out of the water?”

“I’m better off in here,” you tell her. (You feel incredibly guilty in saying this, even though it is probably the most honest you have been with Delphine since meeting her.) “Relax.”

“Fine,” she says. (This is the kind of fine that is not fine, you know.) “Are you on holiday?”

You think Delphine has a talent for asking surprising questions. “No,” you say. Your voice is higher than it should be, like a question of its own.

“Then I hope you will still be around when I come back,” she says.

She does not give you time to reply before she makes her way to shore.

She’s back the next day, on the beach. She’s wearing a bikini now, and you take a minute to appreciate this particular development in style. You are drawn out of this by the realization that she is pulling something—you cannot make out what it is—from her canvas bag.

She looks around again, somewhat more anxiously than before, then sees you. Her face takes on the kind of light it has when she is with her camera.

Delphine waves you forward. “Come here!”

You swim forward. It’s not enough for you to keep from losing the steadiness that the depth of the water gives you, but Delphine finds it enough to join you midway.

She has left her bag and whatever she had removed from it with a family of five sharing a watermelon.

“Cosima!” she says, still smiling.

“Hey.”

“Hi. I was worried about you!”

“You were?” You try to sound like this doesn’t make you extraordinarily happy. You fail at this.

You are, in fact, extraordinarily happy for hours after she leaves. “I’m sorry,” she says when this time comes. “It will only get colder from here. I don’t have your strength of will.”

“Don’t you?” you ask, grinning, because she has been pleading for the family to stay “just ten more minutes, I promise” ever since she joined you.

She shakes her head, her newly-loose hair catching the last of the sunlight in a way that makes you wish you could join her out of the water. “I have to go,” she says, back toward you now. “I hope you do the same.”

“Totally,” you say. “I’ll be, like, ten more minutes.”

Faintly, you hear her laughing before she retrieves her bag from the family, thanking them with almost too much enthusiasm.

You move back underwater before you have to admit to yourself that you’d stopped being able to make her out a few seconds from shore.

She does not come back the next day.

Maybe she trusts you, or doesn’t, or is busy, or isn’t, but she doesn’t show the day after either.

When she finally comes back, she has a camera with her again. (The bikini is also gone, you notice, and decide is for the best. It was too many levels of distracting for you to make any kind of good decision.)

You don’t hide fast enough. She catches you, waves, then, again, nods urgently toward the surface.

“Hey,” you say, again employing the nervous laugh. “What’s up?”

“I’m…” She’s breathless, and you’re not sure if this is a consequence of her humanness or her realization that this is something you lack. “I’m sorry, are you…? Could you…?”

“Hey, chill. It’s cool. What’s up?”

“You’re—are you…?” (Something tells you her nervous laugh is not meant to be endearing here, but a genuine expression of concern. You wish this intuition had come later; imagining yourself as cause for her panic is less pleasant than one would imagine.)

"Yeah," you say, because it feels easiest in the moment.

"Yes?" she asks.

"Yes."

"I'm not sure what you're agreeing to."

"I mean, uh, what were you asking?"

She stops looking at you, which is almost a relief, and says, "It's really not... I don't think you were saying yes. Or, mm, you would not be saying yes. I'm sorry. English is not my first language."

You are what you have understood to be a total asshole. And because of this, you laugh. "Yeah," you say, "ditto, man."

This distracts her momentarily as she tries to figure out what else it could be, guessing every language she can think of. (Some of these are new words for you, you realize, and with that comes the realization that, at some point, these were new words for her, too. You find a strange kind of comfort in this, that Delphine is as much of a stranger to it all as you are.)

"I'm, uh, a mermaid," you tell her, before she has the chance to give up. You sound more anxious than you had anticipated and realize you have never entirely associated this word with yourself, even though it is most likely the only human word ever meant to describe you.

"If you're making fun of me for this—" she says.

"No, no! Hey, uh, meet me around sometime maybe? Does that work? I really... don't know how to prove it to you when there are, um... innocent beachgoers around?"

"I believe you," she says, which you believe would be called unwise.

"You sure?"

"I don't know. But I did think. I mean, I thought what you said. But... thinking is something I need to do more of. I, um... I have to work. Is it... I don't mean to intrude... I normally... I don't know if you know—I... I'm not so used to being able to communicate with subjects, you know?"

"Oh! Yeah, yeah. There's not really a... universal tongue, just... so you know. I can't really help you with anything..."

She bites her lip, thinking, then says, “Of course. I’m sorry. I’ll see you, okay?”

“Yeah!” you say. “Great.”

The next time she meets you, she interrupts herself and asks, “Can you see me?”

You don’t understand what this has to do with what you were talking about. “Uh, yeah?”

“You’re squinting,” she says.

You tell her you don’t recognize the word.

She thinks on this. “It’s um… You’re straining your eyes to see me. Like this,” she says, then narrows her eyes. “Then if I move closer…” (She does so.) “I’m clearer. Do you see?”

You don’t understand her interest in this topic, but you find yourself liking this new closeness too much to do anything but nod.

“So, you could, potentially, be able to see much better, I think. It may not be feasible for your current, ah, lifestyle, but there are many other ways..."

"How?" you ask.

"How..."

"How does it work?"

"Oh! Um, we'll need to test your vision, of course, and the safest option considering your, mm, particular case... would just be a pair of glasses. There are alternatives for humans, of course, and your sight would only be improved when you were above water, but I know you have an interest in observation..."

"That sounds amazing," you say.

She beams. "It is." She glides her fingertips along your arm. "You know, if we brought in a few more people, we could really make some progress with your vision."

You imagine a world in which you can see everything perfectly, are consumed by the idea, but keep yourself from replying. There is some part of you that doesn't want to trust her. While you are calculating your response, Delphine creates a few more inches space between you.

You are squinting to see her for the next hour.

She tells you that this will be one of the last times you’ll have to.

Delphine rarely meets you during the day anymore. She will come late at night or early in the morning, when no one else is around. You prefer this; these times, she wears cutoffs and bikini tops and carries no camera.

She asks that you try to see how far from the water you can get. (You are not a stranger to this practice, of course, because you are curious by nature. Delphine, when you tell her this, seems almost concerned. Still, she asks whether you wouldn’t mind her observing you outside of the water tomorrow night.)

During this period, she asks you a series of questions about your comfort level outside of water, and whether you would feel safe being outside of water for more than a day. She takes a lot of notes on this and glances at her phone’s stopwatch following every question. Every so often, she repeats her initial question. “Are you all right?”

The sun starts to rise, eventually, and if you lean forward, you can tell that Delphine is as exhausted as you are.

“Hey,” you say, quiet now that her questions have gone down to the one. “You okay?”

She brushes some sand off her arms and nods. “Mhm.”

“Not gonna fall asleep on me?” you ask.

She smiles at this. “Too much time in school,” she says. “I’m used to it now.”

(You had previously understood school to be different from this but laugh anyway.)

This observational period, as Dr. Cormier refers to it, lasts for several weeks. The first two hours, she will ask you questions. Sometimes you will make conversation. Most times you don’t. Often, you catch Delphine watching you with a kind of wonder you can’t quite place. (You ask her about it once, and she blushes. You apologize for asking, and she shrugs. “I think it is mutual,” she tells you. You can’t tell if she is referring to the wonder or the apology, but quietly agree with her.)

On the night before the last, she asks if you would feel safe leaving the beach.

“Yeah,” you say. “Of course.”

This isn’t the full truth, but Delphine smiles so warmly that you can almost convince yourself that it is.

She spends the rest of the night tracing what she explains to you to be letters in the sand. You faintly remember this concept and are unsure on how to feel about it. Primarily, you find this process tedious and unlikely to help, but Delphine seems to find it important. After every letter, she makes the apparently corresponding sound, then asks you to do the same. This part comes naturally enough, having spent most of your life repeating human words, but following this request, Delphine brushes the side of her hand over the letter and asks you to write it for yourself. This is, at first, a clumsy kind of thing that strains your wrists and your mind as Delphine watches you with a slightly different type of fascination than usual. You think—you are not sure if you are using the word right—she is being more scientific than usual.

You don’t know how you feel about this, but after your fourth attempt, Delphine smiles, then retraces the letter for you—two lines slanted in on each other connected at the top in a point, then again by a line through the middle.

It’s still shaky the fifth time, the lines wavy and uneven, and Delphine asks if you’d like to move on.

“Nah,” you say, because you remember now that you used to know this, how to make the lines sharp and clear in the sand.

This makes Delphine happy, you think, and she draws the letter again beside yours. “It might help to put more of a curve in your wrist,” she suggests, “but it’s really not so bad.”

You do as she suggests, with an improvement that is just noticeable enough that Delphine says, “Would you like to learn the next one?”

You are not so sure that you would, but her returned warmth makes you agree.

It is easier when you watch her, you think, watch her eyes following her hand as she writes the next letter. It’s not a perfect system, not in any way; your letters are still shakier and lighter in the sand than hers, but it makes the work seem more purposeful somehow, and Delphine, at least, seems to think it helps you catch on.

You are, eventually, able to make it through them all with moderate success, which makes Delphine happier than it does you. She explains, in those few minutes you have before the beach opens back up, that, knowing this, she could, potentially, be getting you glasses any day now. You do not understand what letters and glasses have to do with one another, but you think again about all the things you are missing and do not question her.

She returns several times throughout the month. For each one, she carries the equipment which, you realize somewhat indistinctly, has started to make you more nervous than it previous had. You realize this only in the moment when you think Dr. Cormier catches sight of you before she turns away.

The last day, as you think of it (you have come to break up large periods of time by your conversations with her), she leaves three hours before closing, and returns immediately after in entirely different apparel. (You are slightly embarrassed by the disappointment you feel upon noticing that she has forgone the bikini in favor of a slightly-oversized sweater, but confess this neither to yourself nor to her.)

Still, as soon as you are able to make out her smile, you feel yourself returning it.

Delphine waves you nearer, looking more excited than you can remember ever having seen her. “I have good news,” she tells you once you have made your way entirely out of the water.

“Yeah?”

She pulls a rolled-up white sheet from her canvas bag, still smiling. “It’s not terribly, um, professional,” she says, “but if you want someone else to take a look, the results could be better…”

You have a hard time remembering why you’re so set against the idea, but you shake your head.

She nods. “Do you remember the work we did with letters?” Dr. Cormier asks.

“Yeah.”

“Could you review them with me?”

“Uh, sure, yeah.”

“Okay,” she says, settling into the sand, “I will write the letter in front of you, and I’ll ask you to say it to me. Is that fine?”

“Yeah.”

She smiles, then moves a finger through the sand—two parallel lines, the end of the first connected by a slanted line to the start of the second.

You recognize it immediately, and adore it; it was the last one she showed. “Z,” you say.

“Perfect,” Dr. Cormier says, then brushes her hand across it,

She repeats this several times with various letters until you can get them all within seconds. Delphine seems to have been made incredibly happy by this, and writes several notes very quickly when she finishes her questions. Dr. Cormier, when she is satisfied with these, looks back up at you, smiling, and says, “I think we’re ready to begin.”

She unrolls the white sheet, which you realize now has thick, black letters on it.

“You want me to read that?” you ask.

“Not yet. I have to move it further out. Then, just read as much as you can.”

She makes slow, careful steps away from you, sheet , then shrugs and turns back toward you, making a faint line in the sand with the edge of her shoe. “Is it too dark?” she asks.

You do not know how she defines this, but you know that you can barely make her out, so you say, “Yeah.”

More quickly but no less gracefully, she moves back toward you, the hand not holding the sheet buried in her hair. “Um, let’s see. Do you… She places the poster in the sand, closer to the water than you think is safe, and digs through her bag. Eventually, she seems satisfied, phone in hand. She swipes the screen, and an almost blue light comes from it. She points the light away, thinks on it, then nods.

Then, she hands the phone to you.

You feel immediately nervous, having inquired previously about the thing, and cradle it between your hands as though it’s something sacred. Delphine smiles at this. “You don’t have to worry,” she says quietly. “Keep it a little bit to the side, focused on me. It’s fine.”

You try to imitate the hold she had on it previously, find the position uncomfortable, and look sheepishly toward her for help.

She leans over, still-drying hair brushing across your shoulder and says, “You could fold your hands, then, um… lock them around it?”

You manage to follow these instructions in a clumsy kind of way, and Delphine, with the sheet, moves back to the space previously marked by her sandal.

“Can you see me?” she asks, holding the sheet out beside her.

“Yeah.”

“And the poster?”

“Mhm.”

“So, now, I’ll just want you to read the poster from the top down. Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” you say. “This is gonna help me see?”

“Mm. Not directly. It should, um, gauge your vision. So it can be corrected from there. Does that make sense?”

You’re not sure that it does, but you find yourself too anxious to postpone it any longer. “Yeah!”

You hear her laugh, see the poster shake, and she says, “Whenever you’re ready, we can start.”

You nod. “E… F, P… “

When you can’t make out the letters, Dr. Cormier makes a few more notes and settles into a patch of sand across from you, poster once again rolled, sitting between her legs. When she finally looks back up at you, she reaches out, tentatively, for her phone, touch delicate but hands calloused, swipes again at her screen, and the light goes off.

“So I’ll really be able to see better?” you ask.

Delphine smiles, phone in her pocket and her hands back in yours. “You will.”

You can’t quite imagine this world anything other than how you see it now, but feel a sense of excitement about it that you most closely associate with Delphine. “Sorry,” you say, because you have not spoken for what you imagine is too long. “I’m… I can’t believe I’ll be able to see everything.”

“I don’t know if it will go so far,” Delphine tells you. You can’t quite make out her face in the darkness, but you can hear her smiling.

“Mmm. Is that what you want?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you want to see everything?”

“I don’t think you can,” she tells you.

“But you want to?”

“I might,” she says. “Do you?”

“I don’t know, man. The world is kind of beautiful.”

“It is,” Delphine says, and she sounds almost scared.


	2. Chapter 2

You cannot see everything yet, and you cannot see anything now, but Delphine kisses you.

This is an unfamiliar experience, in relation to yourself, and it ends before you can determine just how you feel about this development, with Delphine jolting away from you.

“I forgot,” she says, standing up now, canvas bag on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” you say, because this is the only way you know how to get her attention without scaring her. “It’s okay.”

She exhales, a sound for which you cannot pinpoint the emotion. You wish, for what you think is for the first time since these nights began, for the sun to rise. “It’s not,” she says, “but thank you.”

You can make out just enough in the darkness to know that she is walking away.

“Delphine?” you ask.

“Mhm?”

Your voice is hoarse, and you don’t know why. “Are you coming back?”

“Eventually,” she tells you. “For work.”

You can’t seem to say anything else, and Delphine is gone before you have the chance.

You are not sure how long it takes, or how many times she misses you before she finally catches you, but when it happens, you feel a kind of weightlessness you cannot remember ever having known. She is dressed for her job this time, camera and all, focused and fascinated and more graceful in the water than any human you’ve ever seen. This fluidity is broken when she sees you, you notice, and feel a moment of panic that she’s not quite so elated to see you.

In spite of this, when you swim to the surface, not sure if you are seeking escape or reunion, she joins you, shivering.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

You don’t quite understand her asking this, and you shrug, hoping this is some indicator of your confusion. “Yeah,” you say. “You?”

“Of course,” she says.

“You sure? You—you seemed kinda… shaken? Sorry, uh, is that the right word? You— You kind of freaked.”

She smiles at this, and you return it, because the feeling of this—of not quite saying anything but smiling with her, with Delphine—is something you have missed more than you should. “I did,” she admits, still smiling but no longer meeting your gaze. She’s quiet, then, not long enough for that feeling to disappear but not so short that you don’t start to wonder if you— “You didn’t,” she says.

“Hm?”

“You didn’t— You didn’t freak.”

“Nah,” you say. “I mean, it’s you.”

“Cosima,” she says carefully, “you do understand… you aren’t human. At least, to my knowledge, you’re not at all…”

“Yeah. Obvs. I mean, probably. You’re, uh… You’re the scientist, Dr. Cormier.”

“Delphine,” she says, not quite focused on anything. “ You’re right. I can bring your glasses tomorrow, if you like.”

It takes a while for you to register the word, and she must be able to tell.

“For your sight?”

“Oh!” you say, again thinking of this beautiful world of clarity. “Can you? Tomorrow?”

“Mhm. If you meet me further, I usually start out away from the— _beachgoers_ , did you say?—so if you returned there? It’s bad weather tomorrow, so it should be just us.”

“Just us?” you ask, not believing it. “In the day?”

“Yes. I hope so, at least. You, um, you can wait for me, by the shore there, if you don’t see anyone, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Delphine keeps to her word.

You don’t wait too long, just enough time for you to trace your letters in this not-quite-familiar sand twice. (The slant-through-the circle—Q—was in the wrong place the first time, you realize, and feel just slightly embarrassed.) You brush your palm over them the moment you see a figure with that swinging-in-the-hips movement you recognize immediately as hers.

She is more relaxed today, you think, wearing the same loose-fitting sweater from that night, looking lazily mesmerized by the world as a whole. It is almost unsettling how much you see yourself in this, but she pulls the glasses from her bag before it gets to you.

They are, essentially, the same type of thing worn by humans in the sun, but with clear glass—you suppose this is wear they get their name—where the shaded part should go. You wonder why Delphine didn’t explain them this way. It would have made things easier, you think, but don’t bother to tell her; she is opening them up, facing them towards you, and…

Her hands are inches from your face. “Is it okay if I put them on?” Delphine asks.

“Yeah,” you say, pushing the tangled hair away from you ears as you’ve seen girls on the beach do before putting on theirs. “For sure.”

For a moment, as the glasses move closer to your face, everything is getting smaller. (You wonder, then, if Delphine has been lying to you, and there will be hundreds of humans whose limbs move swift and rigid to collect you.) The next moment, the glasses are on your face, and everything is so much sharper that this fear seems almost silly. ( _Almost_.)

Delphine—you can make her out perfectly now, and think you could spend days counting the new things to her—looks at you expectantly. “So?” she asks, leaning into you. “Is it like you expected?”

“Mhm,” you say, even though you don’t know.

“I’m glad,” she says.

“Yeah, yeah.” Wait. Collect yourself. “Uh, could you like— Sorry, you’re, like, totally distracting me. Not—uh, not that that’s a bad thing, but I— Could you just— They work if you’re far away, right? Could you, uh—?”

“Oh!” She stands up, brushing sand off her jeans and looking almost embarrassed. “Yes, of course, I… I wasn’t thinking. Should I back up or…?”

“Yeah, uh, just… I wanna see how they work, you know?”

“Of course. I’ll just, mm, get my umbrella— I suppose you don’t… I’ll be back soon.”

Seeing her walk away so distinctly has a kind of sting to it.

When she leaves, really leaves, she takes the glasses with her. This is what you had agreed to, and you understand objectively that going back underwater—as you, of course, tend to do—would ruin them, but you want no more to be separated from them than you do from Delphine.

She brings them to you at night, mostly, the way she used to observe you outside of the water. Being on the shore now is second nature for you, and Delphine rarely asks how you feel about this. Instead, she pulls the glasses from her bag and turns the light of her phone toward the horizon. Sometimes, she will explain to you something new she has learned. Often, this will be related to what she is studying, and you feel a moment of unidentifiable discomfort before you tell yourself that this is no different from your fascination with humans.

On the fifth night, her phone shines a bluish-white glow on her face as she asks you if you are still enjoying your glasses.

“Yeah,” you say. “Obvs. I mean, I’d love to see what else is out there, have them all the time, you know?” You laugh, awkward, because you think this is personal, and Dr. Cormier finds personal details uncomfortable. “I’m being kinda selfish, right?”

“No…” She isn’t looking at her phone now, but not quite at you either. “I mean, you know what I do. I can see your world… At least, some of it. You should see the rest.”

“What?”

“The longest you’ve been out of the water is nine hours. That’s enough time for you to look around a bit, you know. We would have to do some, um… some tests, of course, but the rest of the time… It could be yours, Cosima.”

“Someone’s gonna notice a mermaid hanging around.”

“You’d think they would notice one living so close to shore.”

“You did,” you remind her.

“Am I the first?”

“Nah. One other. A while back.”

“Really?” she asks. She seems surprised by this, which is strange.

“Yeah. It was… a long time ago. They were really young. I don’t think they actually, like, accepted it, but… They were nice.”

“They were human?”

“Yeah. It’s, uh, a long story, but… I don’t know. I guess I still find you guys really interesting.”

“You know,” Dr. Cormier says, “I feel the same.”

This, you think, could be one of the best feelings in the world.

Before she picks you up, you ask Dr. Cormier for your privacy, and she asks you to describe what this means. You are never sure who defines what in this conversation, neither during nor after, but words like synergistic and unprecedented are thrown around, words that you are too overwhelmed to understand. Delphine assures you that everything will be fine.

“The only person who knows about you is Scott,” she says. “You won’t have to see him, if that’s what you want.”

Her thumb is moving across your wrist—from left to right to left—and your voice doesn’t sound like your own. “Don’t,” you say. “Please, uh, Delphine? Please, don’t bring him anywhere near me.”

She nods. “Of course.” Delphine bites her lip. She isn't meeting your eyes. "You don't need to keep seeing me, either... If you don't want to."

This scares you, somehow. You tell yourself that it is not a threat, because this is Delphine, and Delphine is safe and beautiful and human in the best way. You never quite shake this anxiety, and your voice is coarse and quick as you speak. "No! Delphine--You're okay. I mean, you're, uh, you're more than okay, but-- I trust you. You know?"

She hums in a way that you think is in understanding. "Tomorrow, then. Just us. It will mostly be his equipment, of course, and he'll be doing some analysis with me. But he won't see you. Is that okay?"

"Yeah!” Your voice is still rough, and you think you may have answered her too soon.

She smiles anyway, fingertips brushing across the palm of your hand, then through her hair, before she stands up. “I’ll see you,” she says.

“Yeah,” you say. “See ya.”

When she arrives, which is later than she had promised, she is pushing something in front of her that you do not recognize which is maybe half her height and wheeled with a blanket draped across the back.

“It was the easiest way I could think to, ah… transport you,” she explains. She looks embarrassed. “I hope this is okay.”

“Yeah, yeah. I can’t really complain, right?”

“It’s important to me that you feel safe.”

“You know what I mean. I, like— I owe you for life.”

Delphine hands you your glasses and says nothing else for several minutes, at which point she releases a string of apologies regarding a variety of topics as she tries to settle you into the  _thing_  (which she calls a wheelchair, and you appreciate because the name is easy to remember), the blanket wrapped carefully around you.

“This should be fine for now,” she says. She does not ask if you feel comfortable. (You don’t.)

At a time Dr. Cormier refers to as 5:30, she leans over to you and says, “We’re here.”

You find this enchanting and terrifying and also can maybe not get out any of these words at all. You try to express this to Dr. Cormier. She tells you this behavior is natural— _human_ , even, and you feel yourself already more at ease.

You do not know quite how long everything takes, but you know that everything around you is metal and cold and Dr. Cormier’s voice is quiet as it repeats a series of meaningless numbers, not so much to you as to herself. (She is not cold, even now, but her hands are stiff and unfamiliar. You do not remove the glasses from your face, but you close your eyes and pretend that they are metal, too.)

You think she may be doing the same thing to you. Then, maybe this is how it is supposed to be between you. Delphine says that not knowing things can be beautiful. You think this is one of those times, and it is over quickly enough that you do not second-guess yourself.

Every half hour following this process, Delphine will alert you of the time. This means very little to you, in all honesty, but it makes you feel anxious all the same. For six of these periods—that is, three hours—she takes you through a series of streets in silence. You spend most of this time wondering whether or not it would be too personal to tell her that you find yourself falling in love with everyone who passes you. You decide that it probably is, but think secretly that she would know exactly the feeling.

When these three hours have passed, Delphine returns you to the water and lies by the shore, asking you a series of questions not dissimilar from those of her  _observational period_. Now, as they were then, the questions are broken up by the repetition of another: “Are you all right?” (”Yeah,” you say every time. “Obvs.” She moves to the next question immediately.)

She comes back less often now. Dr. Cormier says she is overwhelmed by her work. Still, she will, on occasion, tell you that she has the time to spend a day with you. By this, she means one of these days, during which she brings a spare sweater and a blanket, and, in exchange for several hours of warm hands and cold metal, you are allowed be something like a human.

At some point or another, it becomes clear that you are spending too much time going back and forth from place to place to place, and Delphine asks whether you would be comfortable staying with her.

“What?” Your voice is shaking, you think. You cannot tell. You have grown used to listening to things outside of the water. With the wind and the sea roaring in your ears, it is hard for you to make out anything else. Still, this does not scare you as much as the idea of leaving your home forever. (If it is still your home, at least. You have never felt quite so welcome here as you do when with Delphine.)

“Sorry,” she says, a hand moving quick and light through the air, as though she wants to erase what has already been said. “I mean, it would not be terribly comfortable to start; I mean, all I have is my apartment. But with some more… openness… I really think we could make the most of, um… both of our time.”

You bite your lip ( _like she does_ ) and shrug. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

Delphine nods and drags her hand across the surface of the water. You consider grabbing it before remembering the way your fingers trip over one another to write a single letter.

Some things, you think, are too human for you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's pretend like this was posted reasonably quickly and instead reflect upon how much poetry-reading went into this fic. a lot. a lot of poetry-reading. probably too much. enough that i do not feel like reading this chapter a third time before i publish, which is why it is being published now while i watch grey's anatomy on netflix and pretend that everything is fine. thank you for reading! here's to a faster update...

**Author's Note:**

> so... here's the first part of this monstrosity. i don't want to ruin the illusion or whatever, so i'm gonna try and not talk this down too much, but i really hope that you aren't seeing the glaring faults that i am or at least that you've enjoyed it so far? thank you for reading anyway!! i'm hoping to post part two very soon, but i don't want to get too ahead of myself, so no promises. it should be more, um... cohesive, as this part is actually made up of parts from what was originally all of it? but like i said, hopefully this was still a good read!! yeah :)


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